Violence, Movies and Virginia Tech

Dave Grossman has a book called ON KILLING that I strongly recommend. It’s about every aspect of killing in war situations, and one of the things he talks about is how the military uses films and video simulators to break down a recruit’s natural resistance to killing people. This resistance is natural; it’s inborn, and it has to be eroded or eradicated in order for soldiers to kill.

In World War II, for example, only 15 to 20 percent of the soldiers even fired their weapons, according to Grossman’s statistics. By Vietnam, however, thanks to these training techniques, that figure was up over 90 percent. The problem, however, with turning men into killers is that it’s very hard for them to adjust their minds back to normal life. That’s why there was so much Post Traumatic Stress associated with Vietnam and now Iraq veterans are also having a hard time.

What does this have to do with movies and what do either have to do with Virginia Tech?

Just this: Grossman makes the case that our entire popular culture, our movies and television, the bulk of our narrative entertainment, is exactly like the military’s mind-altering indoctrination. In other words, if we, as a culture, decided that we wanted to turn everybody into a violent maniac, and overcome people’s resistance to killing, we would do exactly what we’re doing now. Make violence fun. Inure people to gore. Basically, Grossman says, our entertainment is like the opposite of what the protagonist of “A Clockwork Orange” went through: It’s virtually designed to make viewers violent.

None of these factors work alone. There is the availability of guns. There are social factors. And of course not everyone will be affected. And some will be affected more than others. This is not cause and effect. There are causes, and there are effects. But to deny the role that violent films and video games play is, in my opinion, to indulge in fantasy. Pop culture plays its role in making life seem cheap and violence empowering, interesting and satisfying.

I wrote the following a little while after Columbine. Instead of repeating myself, I’ll just reprint it. The ideas still apply, and, of course, nothing has changed: